She texted back, “How can I help?” She could leave this useless meeting and be there in a heartbeat.Massive hemorrhaging. She could have called it after seeing Clara at the party: something was not right. But being right felt wrong now. Jess would have given anything not to have known this was going to happen, and she hoped she still didn’t know what was going to happen next. She tried to keep her mind open to all possibilities: They were at the hospital. Clara was in excellent hands. And nobody died in childbirth anymore, she told herself. She kept telling herself.
Her phone buzzed again at a moment when the room had gone quiet, so the sound was like a siren. Everyone turned to look at her.
“Anything to offer, Jess?” asked Edith Morningside, looking disappointed with her protegé for not knowing anything about blockchain and the part it would play in the financial future of the Institute.
“Um, I—” said Jess. Pam had written, “Just stay put. Nick is there. Lu is with us right now. All we can do is wait and hope.” Jess held up her phone. “I’ve sort of got a personal emergency going on here.” She knew what they were thinking: her kids. That they’d made her late already. She said, “It’s my friend.” Elliott Lubbock had turned around to look at her, as smug as any mediocre man who had just stolen a job from a woman who’d worked ten years for it. She’d like to hear just what he had to say on the topic of luminescence and golden flax.
Another text arrived from Pam: “Her sisters are praying.” Of course they were praying, they were always praying, but now Jess was grateful. She could pray too, for her best friend, and for those babies, and she just couldn’t spend another moment in that suffocating room with those people who were plotting her downfall, who were staring at her now waiting for her to crack.
So she left. She’d scarcely arrived, so it wasn’t hard to go. She threw the strap of her bag back over her shoulder and walked out of the room, not even turning around to note the questions or hubbub she was leaving behind her. She called the elevator and went downstairs, then outside—not to her car, but to the street, where everywhere was empty. She’d forgotten it could be like this on a weekday morning, when the only people out were old men who still wore hats and shuffled down the sidewalks with their canes, nannies pushing strollers with sleeping kids inside. She walked north, the wind whipping through her light coat, making litter dance in sweeping circles up and down the sidewalk.
Her coat was so light she didn’t have to check it, and she slung it over her arm instead. She didn’t even have to wait in line for admission because the museum was as empty as the sidewalks, quiet and echoing. Where had everybody gone? Jess showed her membership card to get a ticket for the special exhibit, the reason she’d made the trip, and took the elevator down to the basement.
Downstairs it was dark, and there wasn’t any weather. The walls of the exhibit were painted black, and the bright spotlights focussed on cases displaying jewelry still shiny after centuries buried in ash. There was another case with a dog rendered in plaster, its legs awkwardly contorted. Jess was glad to be without her children. They wouldn’t have likedthis. Or maybe she wouldn’t have liked having to explain it to them. They’d be asking if it was a real dog, and she would tell them it wasn’t, which was a lie. Or not exactly. Which was no real consolation for the enormity of what had been lost.
Jess saw a face, a child’s face, round cheeks and plump lips, the kind of face you might see on a vintage Christmas card, the face of an angel, a face from a statue, all its details preserved. It was rendered in plaster as well, but in a different fashion, no accident. Its eyes were watching Jess. The rest of the statue was fragments now.
So much had been preserved in ash: an actual loaf of bread, a tile with an etched image of a bakery. Busts with broken noses, the identity of their subjects now lost to history. Kitchen utensils and weigh scales from the market. All these things had been buried, although the irony was that with their unearthing came inevitable breakdown. Submerged under centuries of ash, pieces of ancient, ordinary life could be preserved forever, but when they were unearthed, they began to decompose. What a paradox. Was there a folly in searching, in wanting to know?
Pompeii. There had been rumblings. None of it had been wholly unexpected. What kind of person builds their house in the shadow of a volcano? It’s asking for trouble.Vesuvius. Like the name of a comic-book villain. Etymology unknown, apparently. When Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, it sent black clouds up into the sky for miles.
Walking around, Jess learned about ordinary life in Pompeii, about plumbing and housing and aqueducts. She wasn’t alone; there were a few other visitors down here too. The exhibit was new, a big deal for a museum that was struggling with its bottom line. A museum was such a permanent fixture, you would think, culturally speaking, preserving allof time…and yet this museum was just a hundred years old. A chronological blip in a grand scheme, the newest wing replacing another that had been built two decades ago. That nothing is permanent is something Jess hadn’t realized years ago when she and Clara had made their home across the street, the museum an imposing shadow that blocked out the late-afternoon sun.
Jess remembered when Clara worked at the museum on six-month contracts, how they never hired her permanently, all the precarity. How difficult it had been during those years after she returned from abroad and all her experience counted for nothing. Clara had never known how to play the game, and she claimed she didn’t even want to know. Sometimes she was so reckless.
But now Clara could die. This is what Jess was thinking as she turned a corner and saw an image of the exploding volcano projected on the wall, audio rumblings enhancing the experience. Miranda’s partner was a doctor—a psychiatrist, but still, he’d gone to medical school—and he told Jess that a home birth with twins in the condition Clara was in was the craziest thing he’d ever heard.
On another wall, a chart depicted the height of the ash as it fell, a suffocating storm that buried everything. It had been four stories, higher than a house. You couldn’t expect to crawl out of that. You could imagine yourself, furiously digging, trying to rise through the debris, to keep your head above the deluge. Was it still called a deluge if the force wasn’t water? What was the word for a deluge of ash?
Jess imagined herself to be the exception. Surely everybody did that. She would be the one to survive, to persist, in keeping with the rules of narrative. Though it was impossible to imagine how she could make her way through the torrentof suffocating ash and have her hands free. There would be no way to survive and also bring her children, and without them, what would survival be?
Around the next corner were plaster casts of human bodies made of cavities left when the bodies eventually decomposed, the bodies of the people of Pompeii, people who’d built their homes, and their bakeries, and their aqueducts in the shadow of a volcano. It was terrible to see, a violation of their humanity. An invasion. It seemed wrong to be a witness to such a horrible private moment, such startling vulnerability, parents with their arms wrapped around their children, using their entire bodies as protection, a futile measure. Because the ash came down and buried them all, and there was not a single thing that anyone could do.
Those poor people, thought Jess. They were no different than her, or anyone else strolling through the exhibit this morning. They were people who got up on an ordinary day and were going about the motions of their daily lives, never anticipating what was going to happen. And how do you ever know when or where it’s going to come from, what is going to rain down from black clouds over your head, subsuming your world and your life?
At the end of the exhibit was a gift shop, though Jess didn’t linger there. She made her way out, and up in the elevator to the lobby, and outside to the light, and the fact that the world was still there was surprising.
EVER AFTER
But Clara survived. She lived. Shelives. She feels this point can’t be emphasized enough, even though the people who loved her were all too keen to dismiss it, almost as though the actual outcome was beside the point.
And how do you measure that, the line between everything that could have happened and what actually did? A hair’s breadth. The skin of your teeth. Lately Clara was preoccupied by idioms—what exactlywasthe straw that broke the camel’s back? Clara pictured drinking straws, the bendy kind for milkshakes. Her children chewed on those, their tiny tooth marks along their lengths. Tricks of language kept tripping Clara up, and teeth were part of the trouble, erupting from the softness of her children’s gums in a seemingly endless process, keeping everybody up at night.
Clara just couldn’t visualize it—the breadth of a hair. As though it were nothing, when such a space contained infinity: the distance between life and death, huge and intractable. But maybe the problem was her. These days, Clara had trouble visualizing most things, trouble seeing anything exceptfor the scene in front of her eyes, which was usually a mess, spilled juice and a carpet of toys, a leaning tower of laundry that was sometimes clean but never folded—because who had time for folding? Who had time, when there were children to catch, and grab and cuddle and feed and comfort and rock and sway and love and devour?
Two years ago, for weeks after the twins were born, Clara had been confined to her bed while her incision healed, and there were bedpans and gross bloody gauze, and it was terrible, but she just fed her babies and they grew, and Lu climbed on top of her and lay down as though her mother were a sofa, and it was here that Clara gave in, submitted to, and just became a sofa.I am plush and for comfort, she affirmed to herself, and just rolled with it. At night Nick came to bed and curled up against her, and they were all of them there—the little babies on one side and Nick on the other, and Lu curled up at the foot of the bed because she liked to sleep splayed out like a star. There they were, floating, and the bed was their world, and never mind that her wound wasn’t healing, that it couldn’t air properly, tucked as it was inside her rolls of flesh. This was why babies weren’t supposed to be born that way, on a surgical ward, and the only thing that really caught Clara up in those wondrous early days was the injustice of it all and the indignity of her experience of birth. She was furious at having been reduced to an object, a body that bled and bled.
But she had recovered, impossibly, and her body was doing its thing again, after it had all gone so wrong, after the night she still couldn’t think about, even though Nick had never stopped. The one thing about having it happen to her was that at least she didn’t have to see it, but Nick couldn’t get the picture out of his head, he said. Even when he closedhis eyes it was there, the way the blood came and how life had appeared to drain right out of her—“I’d never seen anyone go that colour.” And how the midwife, the one they’d never liked anyway, had panicked. She freaked out, and Nick thought he’d have to call an ambulance for both of them, though it had almost been a welcome distraction from the sight of his wife dying before his eyes.
“I wasn’t dying,” Clara reminded him.
“But I didn’t know that,” said Nick. “It really could have gone either way.” The midwife finally gathered her senses before the paramedics arrived and turned on the overhead lights, the whole scene transformed into something glaring and pounding. All the adrenaline, and the flashing lights of the ambulance out on the street illuminating the neighbourhood with alarm.
How does a person get over that? Clara didn’t know, but you can, and you do. There had been the infection, but her wound healed eventually, and one day she could get up, go to the bathroom, even take a walk beyond the end of the street. It was the kind of experience that makes mere newborn twins seem almost easy. “After that,” Clara said, “everything else is a picnic.”
Things were good now. But part of being good meant understanding that this life had limits, and you couldn’t push too hard. Clara kept her expectations low. All she needed to be was a sofa, and if she could manage that then the day was a success, and so they stayed curled up all afternoon. Lu was watching Elmo on TV and the twins were eating—still breastfeeding, and Clara hadn’t even had to supplement after their second week. She was amazing. She was a superhero. She’d never been so pleased with herself, and nobody could tear her down.
And as the babies grew, she didn’t get any more ambitious. There would be time for ambition, and right now it was autumn in all its glory, and then winter when there was no point in going outside, and spring again—they watched it all unfolding out the window, those seasonal scenes, and nothing ever stayed the same. So it would actually be unfair to accuse Clara of lacking in vision, because she was paying attention, even with everything she’d lived through—the blood and the recovery, the building of two more humans into toddling, terrifying bundles of motion that never stopped.
